mpeg streamclip.
Compressor is configured to only use one core. You can configure it to use more......
To elaborate on this, you have to set up a virtual cluster in Qmaster to take advantage of a multi-core CPU in Compressor. Compressor is still a 32-bit application and what Qmaster essentially does is "trick" Compressor into running multiple instances of itself in order to harness additional CPU resources. You can read more about how to do this at these links:
For Compressor 4 (current; sold alongside FCP X and Motion 5)
For Compressor 3.x and earlier (packaged with Final Cut 6 and 7)
But do note that this is really only beneficial on systems that have more than two physical CPU cores. It won't make much of a difference on a dual-core.
I just discovered this feature...I was curious about it as last I checked Compressor 4 is 32-bit....is it beneficial on a quad core i7 or would I need something like dual xeon's to really benefit?
Absolutely. If you have a quad-core, I'd experiment with 2 or 4 instances and run a few test encodes on both to see what yields the best performance. Compressor seems to run best for me with Qmaster set to 4 instances on my 2008 8-core. But it may be a different case with HyperThreading enabled CPUs like the i7.
I think I'm going to stick with 4 instances...no idea how HyperThreading and Compressor works, I'm sure it'll be fine but I know HyperThreading can decrease performance at times. I'm just wondering if the instances will do 4 threads or 4 cores, if this were something like After Effects I'd just it recognize the cores and threads properly. Hmm I'll dive in with some stuff to encode.
I honestly though >4 instances would either not make a difference or crash!